Commissioned by Kronos Quartet for the Celebrate Brooklyn Festival. Premiere 12th March 2009 at the MusicNOW Festival and 18th July 2009 in Prospect Park, Brooklyn

  • String Quartet
  • 10 min
    • 29th June 2025, Winterer-Foyer, Freiburg, Germany
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Programme Note

Aheym means ‘homeward’ in Yiddish, and this piece is written as musical evocation of the idea of flight and passage. As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. (My father’s family were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia). She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past. In her poem “Di rayze aheym,” the American-Yiddish poet Irena Klepfisz, a professor at Barnard in New York and one of the few child survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, writes: “Among strangers is her home. Here right here she must live. Her memories will become monuments."

Aheym is dedicated to my grandmother, Sarah Dessner.

(c) Bryce Dessner

Media

Aheym
Kronos Quartet with Bryce Dessner

Scores

Score Sample

Reviews

The sensibility of his writing for string quartet is much the same as in his songs, and this translates into an incredibly interesting work.
Grant Damron, bachtrack.com
9th December 2013

Discography

Aheym

Aheym
  • Label
    Anti
  • Catalogue Number
    Anti 7296-2
  • Ensemble
    Kronos Quartet

More Info